1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the field of secure electronic messaging, and in particular to indicating security message information for a secure message.
2. Description of the Related Art
Messages encrypted according to secure messaging protocols such as Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) or Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) among others can be encrypted using different ciphers. There are numerous ciphers available for this purpose, such as Triple Data Encryption Standard (Triple-DES), and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), among others. Some ciphers are classified as “strong” ciphers, while others are classified as “weak” ciphers. Additionally, the perceived strength of a cipher may change over time, as new cryptanalytic attacks for the cipher are discovered.
When a user receives an encrypted message, the level of trust that the user can place on the validity of the message and the authenticity of the sender depends on the strength of the cipher used for encryption. If a strong cipher is used, the user can be confident that the message was not read by someone or tampered with. The weaker the cipher used, the less confident the user may be regarding the security of the communications channel.
Secure messaging clients, such as email applications for desktop or mobile computing devices, typically indicate details of the cipher used for the received secure message. For instance, the messaging client may indicate that the Triple-DES cipher algorithm was used to encrypt the message. However, indicating the cipher used may not necessarily indicate to the user whether the cipher used is considered to be strong or weak unless the user is well-versed in the area of cryptography. Additionally, different users may have different standards for determining the strength of a cipher and thus they may have differing perceptions regarding whether a particular cipher is “strong” or “weak.”